Energy Reports 1 (2015) 17–21

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Energy Reports
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/egyr

Transient effect of soil thermal diffusivity on performance of EATHE

system
Anuj Mathur a,∗ , Ayushman Srivastava b , Jyotirmay Mathur a , Sanjay Mathur a ,
G.D. Agrawal a
a
Centre for Energy and Environment, Malaviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur-302017, India
b
Civil Engineering Department, Malaviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur-302017, India

article info abstract

Article history: This paper presents effect of thermo-physical properties of soil on performance of an Earth Air Tunnel
Received 25 August 2014 Heat Exchanger (EATHE). The analysis has been carried out using a validated three-dimensional, transient
Received in revised form numerical model for three different types of soil. The governing equations, based on the k–ε model
27 November 2014
and energy equation were used to describe the turbulence and heat transfer phenomena, are solved by
Accepted 30 November 2014
Available online 14 January 2015
using finite volume method. Comparisons were made in terms of temperature drop, heat transfer rate
and COP of the EATHE system by operating it continuously for 12 h duration. The study reveals that
each soil exhibits different rate of heat dissipation and thermal saturation over a period of continuous
operation, which adversely affects the performance of EATHE. Dissipation of heat from the EATHE pipes
to its surrounding soil and subsequently to the outer subsoil region is mainly found to be depending upon
the thermal conductivity of soil; even of their thermal diffusivity is of different order.
© 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

1. Introduction Study conducted by Santamouris et al. (1995) revealed that incre-

Passive heating/cooling systems consume no or very less en-
ergy as compared to active heating and cooling systems. In order to
utilize these passive heating/cooling systems with great heat ca-
pacity and high thermal inertia, many techniques have been devel-
oped in the last decades such as earth air tunnel heat exchanger.
The earth air tunnel heat exchanger system is one of the impor-
tant energy efficient ways to provide both space heating and cool-
ing because of very small variation of soil temperature viz-a-viz
ambient air temperature throughout the year. This facilitates ex-
traction or rejection of heat from the building space to the subsoil
region.
Over the last decade, a number of performance analyses on
earth air tunnel heat exchanger systems have been carried out
to improve and enhance its thermal performance, either using
numerical modeling or via experiments. Thermal performance of
earth air heat exchanger system were studied (Bansal et al., 1985;
Ajmi et al., 2006; Thanu et al., 2001) to provide thermal comfort
inside the buildings in India using ground as heat source and sink.
∗ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: anujmathur89@yahoo.com (A. Mathur).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.egyr.2014.11.004
2352-4847/© 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.
0/).
ment in the length of buried-pipe and soil height above the pipes
resulted in an increase in the system cooling capacity. An EATHE
system integrated with evaporative cooler (Bansal et al., 2012) and
air conditioner (Said et al., 2010) provides 4500 MJ of cooling effect
during summer months and 18.1% (Mishra et al., 2012) reduced
power consumption of air conditioner respectively. It can be con-
cluded from previous studies that EATHE systems have a potential
to provide cooling effect.
Due to the improvement in numerical technique various re-
searchers tried to explore the effect of various design, operating
and geographical parameters on to the thermal performance of
EATHE, such as effect of the pipe length, radius, depth and air
flow rate (Huijun et al., 2007), installed depth variation (Cucumo
et al., 2008). Further, effects of ground temperature gradient, sur-
face conditions, moisture content, have also been identified as im-
portant design aspects of earth air tunnel heat exchanger (Kumar
et al., 2003), along with effect of length, radius of pipe and air mass
flow rate (Sodha et al., 1993) on the cooling potential of an under-
ground air pipe system.
Study on the effect of soil thermal conductivity (Bansal
et al., 2013) on to the thermal performance of EATHE system
revealed that thermal performance of the system influenced by the
thermal conductivity of the system but author assumes thermal
conductivity values taking specific heat and density same for
18 A. Mathur et al. / Energy Reports 1 (2015) 17–21

Fig. 1. CFD model of EATHE.

all three cases of soil. An improved theoretical model (Ozgener Table 1

et al., 2013) that includes short term weather variations, seasonal Geometrical and simulation parameters.

variations, moisture content and thermal conductivity of soil was Parameters Unit Value
presented to predict the daily soil temperatures variation with EATHE pipe length m 40
depth and time. A three dimensional numerical model (Eicker Pipe Outer diameter m 0.1
and Vorschulze, 2009) was used to analyze the influence of soil Surrounding soil diameter m 1.1
properties and operation strategies. Numerical results of this study Air density (kg m−3 ) 1.225
Air thermal conductivity (W m−1 K−1 ) 0.02
suggest that the heat dissipation mostly depends upon the soil
Air specific heat capacity (J kg−1 K−1 ) 1006
thermal conductivity. HDPE Pipe density (kg m−3 ) 940
However, it may be noted that despite having same thermal HDPE thermal conductivity (W m−1 K−1 ) 0.4
conductivity, soils may have different thermal diffusivity due to HDPE specific heat capacity (J kg−1 K−1 ) 2000
change in density and specific heat. PVC pipe density (kg m−3 ) 1380
This paper presents analysis carried out on three different soils PVC thermal conductivity (W m−1 K−1 ) 1.16
PVC specific heat capacity (J kg−1 K−1 ) 900
with different thermal diffusivity values. Out of the three, two soils
Soil density (kg m−3 ) 2050
were having very close values of thermal conductivity but signifi- Soil specific heat (J kg−1 K−1 ) 1840
cantly different thermal diffusivity values. Three dimensional sim- Soil thermal conductivity (W m−1 K−1 ) 0.52
ulation software package, FLUENT 6.3, was used to analyze the
thermal performance of EATHE. Evaluation has been carried out
through studying the temperature drop of air, heat transfer rate Table 2
Boundaries conditions.
and COP for the EATHE system.
Boundaries Unit Value

2. System description and simulation setup Initial soil temperature °C 27

The CFD simulations were performed with the commercial CFD
code Fluent 6.3 and the use of preprocessor Gambit 2.2 for the
geometry and 3D mesh creation to investigate the effect of thermal
diffusivity on to the thermal performance of EATHE system.
2.1. Physical model
Description of the geometrical configuration of earth air tunnel
heat exchanger and surrounding soil is presented in Table 1. Phys-
ical geometry (Fig. 1) of the EATHE system consists of 40 m long
HDPE pipe with 0.1 m outer diameter. The control volume was de-
fined through creating a cylinder volume of soil around the EATHE
pipe. Diameter of soil cylinder was kept 1.1 m, geometry was cre-
ated using Gambit (version 2.2.3) as preprocessor. Structured hex-
ahedral meshing (Fig. 1) was used. Numerical simulations were
tested by varying the number of elements of mesh and stability of
convergence of the model was achieved for all the meshes.
2.2. Simulation model
FLUENT (version 6.3) software was used in this study that uses
finite volume method to convert the governing equations to nu-
merically solvable algebraic equations. As the flow is turbulent, k–ε
model is selected as turbulent model for analysis of the problem.
Energy equation is also kept ON as a heat transfer model. This nu-
merical investigation was based on the following assumptions:
1. Thermal–physical properties of solids and fluids remains con-
stant over the range of soil and air temperature during operation.
Initial pipe temperature °C 27
Air inlet velocity m s−1 5
Air inlet temperature °C 46.2
2. Inlet air velocity was constant throughout the operation of
tunnel.
The far-field boundaries were treated as adiabatic wall and
EATHE pipe wall and surrounding soil temperatures were initial-
ized with 27 °C as shown in Table 2. Velocity inlet boundary condi-
tion was specified for the inlet air velocity i.e. 5 m/s and a ‘pressure
outlet’ condition for the outlet for the air.
3. Grid independence test
Grid independence test (Fig. 2) was to be conducted to assess
the quality of developed CFD model. If the mesh is refined (i.e. the
cells are made smaller in size hence larger in number), then
the behavior observed by the post processing should remain
unchanged if the solution is grid-independent. To have grid
independent solution, simulations are run for two grid sizes
i.e. 0.04 m and 0.03 m taking operating parameters same for both
cases.
It can be concluded from Fig. 2 that there is no or minimum
effect on the operating parameters when we change the grid
size from 0.03 m to 0.04 m. Therefore, 0.04 m element size was
chosen as the model grid size as it gives better accuracy and lesser
computational time.
 A. Mathur et al. / Energy Reports 1 (2015) 17–21 19

Fig. 2. Grid independence test.

Fig. 3. Air outlet temperature comparison between numerical solutions.

4. Validation of CFD model
The developed CFD model was validated against the numerical
solution obtained by Mishra et al. (2013), which were experimen-
tally verified and reported. Maximum difference in temperature at
various points in the two studies was found to be 0.72 °C, whereas,
for most of the points, temperatures were having same value as
shown in Fig. 3. This shows good agreement between the two nu-
merical solutions.
5. Selection of soil for analysis
Three soils were selected with significant difference in their soil
thermal diffusivity as mentioned in Table 3. Soil ‘J’ and ‘F’ were
selected for significantly different thermal diffusivity and very
close thermal conductivity. This was done to investigate role of
thermal diffusivity as well as thermal conductivity on performance
of EATHE.
6. Results and discussion
Thermal performance of EATHE was numerically investigated
for three different soils to examine the effect of thermo-physical
properties of soil on to its thermal performance respectively. Per-
formance was evaluated through examining the drop in air tem-
perature, heat transfer rate, soil temperature and COP of EATHE
system.
20 A. Mathur et al. / Energy Reports 1 (2015) 17–21

Table 3
Soil properties.
Soil Location Density (kg m−3 ) Specific heat capacity Thermal conductivity Thermal diffusivity Reference
(J kg−1 K−1 ) (W m−1 K−1 ) (m2 /s)

Soil A Ajmer (India) 2050 1840 0.52 1.37 × 10−7 Bansal et al. (2013)
Soil J Jodhpur (India) 1470 1553.14 1 4.37 × 10−7 Chandra et al. (0000)
Soil F Presles (France) 1500 880 1.280 9.69 × 10−7 Boithias et al. (2009)

Table 4
Hourly variation in air temperature along the pipe length for three types of soil.
Length of pipe (m) Air temperature (°C)
1h 3h 6h 12 h
A J F A J F A J F A J F

0 46.20 46.20 46.20 46.20 46.20 46.20 46.20 46.20 46.20 46.20 46.20 46.20
10 37.42 36.49 36.49 38.5 37.51 37.45 39.27 38.17 38.01 39.98 38.75 38.51
20 32.46 31.48 31.48 33.64 32.52 32.45 34.56 33.24 33.07 35.49 33.83 33.51
30 29.84 29.09 29.09 30.79 29.85 29.80 31.59 30.40 30.26 32.43 30.79 30.52
40 28.46 27.96 27.96 29.12 28.43 28.4 29.73 28.76 28.66 30.33 28.98 28.81

Table 3 shows that all the three soils were having different Table 5
combinations of density, specific heat and thermal conductivity Hourly temperature variation of soil layers at section 10 m length from inlet.

leading to significant difference in their thermal diffusivities. The Time (h) Soil Temperatures (°C) at various radial distances
thermal diffusivity values for the three soils have been calculated from pipe surface
as 1.37 × 10−7 m2 /s, 4.37 × 10−7 m2 /s and 9.69 × 10−7 m2 /s. 0.05 m 0.25 m
Table 4 shows the variation in air outlet temperature at different A J F A J F
sections along the pipe length for three different types of soil 1 28.46 28.81 29.21 27.00 27 27.01
for continuous 12 h operation. It can be observed that the air 3 30.07 30.15 30.46 27.00 27.06 27.29
outlet temperature was getting affected due to gradual heat 6 31.34 31.09 31.25 27.00 27.29 27.75
12 32.61 31.95 31.88 27.01 27.65 28.15
accumulation and thermal saturation of soil.
For soil A, that has least thermal diffusivity, the air temperature
at a section of 10 m from inlet increases by 2.56 °C after 12 h of Table 6
continuous operation. This is because of continuous heat transfer Hourly temperature variation of soil layers at section 20 m length from inlet.
from air to soil (through the pipe) is faster as compared to transfer Time (h) Soil Temperatures (°C) at various radial distances
of heat in the sub-layers of soil. This difference results into higher from pipe surface
subsoil temperature surrounding the pipe as compared to the 0.05 m 0.25 m
sub soil temperature to the beginning, thereby, reducing the heat A J F A J F
transfer from air to soil in subsequent hours.
1 27.76 27.81 27.99 27.00 27.00 27.00
For Soil J and F, air temperature at 10 m length increases by
3 28.72 28.59 28.72 27.00 27.00 27.10
2.26 °C and 2.02 °C respectively after continuous 12 h operation. 6 29.60 29.18 29.24 27.00 27.08 27.28
The increase in temperature is lesser for soil having higher thermal 12 30.53 29.58 29.49 27.00 27.15 27.36
conductivity, due to lesser difference between the rate of heat
transfer between the air to soil and rate of heat transfer in sub-
layers of soil. Table 7
Hourly temperature variation of soil layers at section 30 m length from inlet.
Hence it can be clearly concluded that the performance of
EATHE gets deteriorated during continuous running operation Time (h) Soil Temperatures (°C) at various radial distances
from pipe surface
mainly due to saturation of nearby situated subsoil. This deteriora-
tion was less pronounced in soil having higher thermal conductiv- 0.05 m 0.25 m

ity because it provides faster heat dissipation from the soil layers A J F A J F
situated in the immediate vicinity of EATHE pipe to the sub-soil 1 27.35 27.36 27.43 27.00 27.00 27.00
layers situated away from the pipe in the radial direction. 3 27.90 27.76 27.84 27.00 27.00 27.00
Tables 5–7 show the temperature variation of the soil at 10, 20 6 28.44 28.04 28.06 27.00 27.00 27.03
12 28.98 28.21 28.17 27.00 27.00 27.05
and 30 m lengths and at 0.05 and 0.25 m away from the pipe after
different time period of continuous operation.
It can be noticed that the penetration of heat because of Hence, it can be concluded that the EATHE system with higher
heat transfer between the air and surrounding soil depends upon
thermal conductivity soil gives better thermal performance even
the thermal conductivity of soil. Penetration of heat into the
after prolonged continuous operation. The phenomenon of better
surround soil was more with soil J and F because of higher thermal
thermal performance of EATHE with higher thermal conductivity
conductivity and can only penetrate maximum up to 0.25 m away
occurs due to better dissipation of heat from the soil layers situated
from the EATHE pipe with 12 h continuous running operation.
in the immediate vicinity of EATHE pipe to the soil layers situated
Beyond this distance from the pipe, no significant rise in soil
temperature was observed. away from the soil pipe interface in the radial direction.
Similarly, for soil having lesser thermal conductivity i.e. soil A, It can also be noticed that as the distance from inlet increases,
this penetration of heat was restricted to even lesser radial distance the effect of heat accumulation reduces. This leads to a conclusion,
from pipe surface for same operating conditions and duration. This that the effect of soil saturation on continuous operation, and with
suggests that penetration of heat into the soil is mainly influenced soil of low conductivity, can be offset by providing extra length of
by the thermal conductivity of soil. pipe.
 A. Mathur et al. / Energy Reports 1 (2015) 17–21 21

Table 8 2. Soil with higher thermal diffusivity has higher rate of heat
Hourly variation of heat transfer rate through EATHE pipe. transfer and can transfer more amount of heat through the
Type of soil Average heat transfer rate through EATHE pipe nearby soil to the outer subsoil quickly. Therefore higher tem-
surface after different hours of operation perature observed in subsoil layer at 0.25 m away from the
(W/m2 )
EATHE pipe.
1h 3h 6h 12 h
3. Thermal performance of EATHE deteriorates after continuously
Soil A 44.50 43.98 43.45 42.92 operated for long time. This deterioration was more observed
Soil J 44.92 44.68 44.49 44.36 with least thermal conductivity of soil because of saturation of
Soil F 44.92 44.69 44.54 44.45
soil situated nearby to the EATHE pipe.
4. Effect of thermal saturation on continuous operation of EATHE
Table 9 especially for soil of low conductivity, can be compensated by
Hourly variation in COP of EATHE system.
providing extra length.
Type of soil COP after different hours of operation
1h 3h 6h 12 h
Acknowledgments
Soil A 4.29 4.13 3.98 3.83
Soil J 4.41 4.29 4.21 4.16
Soil F 4.41 4.30 4.24 4.20 We acknowledge financial support provided by the Department
of Science and Technology, Government of India under US–India
Centre for Building Energy Research and Development (CBERD)
Hourly variation of heat transfer rate from EATHE pipe to soil project, administrated by Indo-US Science and Technology forum
and COP of EATHE system with different hours of operation are (ISSUTF) (grant number IUSSTF/JCERDC-EEB/2012).
presented in Tables 8 and 9 respectively.
It can be observed in Table 8 that average rate of heat trans-
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